Firstly, I have no clue why Nintendo never put out something like this - it would have been a huge moneymaker for them I think...

Messing around with this some the last couple days - some observations and questions to start the discussion. (un?)Fortunately, I'm going on vacation for a couple weeks.

The mechanics are VERY similar to Pokemon, with some exceptions.- 3 Pets in group.- Each pet can use 3 skills (once they hit level 4). Note that you'll get 6 total by level 20, but can't just choose "any 3" - you have to take one of the (1 or 10), (2 or 15), and (4 or 20) skills.- Each pet also has a "quality", from Gray to Blue (just like items).- Each pet family has a passive effect (Beasts do more damage below 50% HP, etc)- "Super Effective" attacks are 150% damage, "Weak" ones are 66%.

Not sure if the "starter" one you buy from the Pet Trainer is rare or not...

You can also catch Rares out in the wild. It's probably easiest to just catch the first one of everything you don't have (at the level of the zone you're in), and then compare stats for subsequent battles - if the new one has higher stats grab that one and release the worse one. Not sure what percentage are rare - didn't see (or perhaps recognize) any for quite a while but have gotten 4 in rapid succession recently (Southern Barrens/Dustwallow Marsh).

There are a couple of "intro" quests from the capital-city trainer, and then he'll send you out to defeat the Master Tamer in the starting zone. If you win that, you'll get "chained" to the next Master Tamer, and so on. These quests are Account-shared - if you switch toons you'll stay in the same place on this quest chain.

(I'm Horde, and the Tamers so far have been Durotar, Northern Barrens, Ashenvale, Desolace, and Southern Barrens. Not sure if there's a quest line I can pick up for the other continent - the tamers are there for the achievement but I don't know how to find them. Looked around Undercity a bit but didn't see anything obvious...)

You can also challenge other players, either when you run across them (right-click portrait -> Pet Battle), or from the "Find Battle" button on the Pet screen. That button puts you into a LFG-type queue, and the battle is in a random location with a weather effect.

... the fact that more potential voters are swayed by a few trivial comments 10 years ago than a candidate literally collapsing is not a good sign and tends to indicate that even if Trump wins, it won't matter.

No electorate that stupid is going to survive long, one way or another.

My group at the moment - level 10/11:- Clockwork Gnome: Turrets are amazing - they're the highest DPT attack I've seen, plus they hit things that are flying/underground as part of a 2-turn attack. They can also carry a repair through dying (and the Mechanical-Ankh).- Dark Whelpling: Slow but hits really hard.- Small Frog: A caught Rare that's the most annoying thing in the world. Frog Kiss is SO good - 25% chance to polymorph for a round, plus the Frog is quite fast and usually attacks first. If the Poly hits it's basically a 2-turn stun as it negates the current attack and prevents the next round's attack. It has a strong self-heal, too.

I was using a Strand Crawler before I got the Small Frog - it was about as close to a Tank as is possible. (Tons of HP, a Shield, and a HoT).

Need to level an Undead and an Elemental, can't decide which ones though.UD: Fossilized Hatchling (BONESTORM!), but the other Archeology one with Death Grip might be better.Elem: I have the Tiny Shale Spider, Crimson Lasher, and Elem Geode - all three have their good points. Leaning toward the Geode at the moment but not sure at all.Need a Humanoid-type (or something with Humanoid-type attacks), no idea where to get one though.

1-1 in PvP "LFG" battles. Lost with 9s vs 10s (but it was close, had his last one down to half), and won with 10s vs 10s. The win was funny - the person ran away after I got his first pet down - the Frog had hit on poly like 4 times already at that point and I think that ticked him off.

(I know it ticked me off when I lost a rare Spider catch to the dumb Frog killing my whole team basically by itself! I've been "grinding XP" about 2 levels higher than my Pet's level, so Dustwallow Marsh (12s) for my 10s - they can handle that fairly well and the XP bonuses are nice. I use the Pet-Doctor basically on cooldown though!)

... the fact that more potential voters are swayed by a few trivial comments 10 years ago than a candidate literally collapsing is not a good sign and tends to indicate that even if Trump wins, it won't matter.

No electorate that stupid is going to survive long, one way or another.

Hmm, 5-10k seems really high for a guaranteed drop. I've hardly any Goblin-blood in me, but I'm going to guess probably about 1k each?

(I do have a single extra one of those I can sell, as well as a pair of extra Strand Crawlers.)

For comparasion, Elementium Geodes were going for about 600 (probably too low), and Dark Whelplings for about 10k. Whelplings have a stupid-low drop rate though. Haven't checked the drop rate of the Geode.

As a side note, both people I LFG-PvPed had a dragonling of some sort (one Dark, one Azure), and one of them had a Magical Crawdad. The rare pets should certainly sell well...

... the fact that more potential voters are swayed by a few trivial comments 10 years ago than a candidate literally collapsing is not a good sign and tends to indicate that even if Trump wins, it won't matter.

No electorate that stupid is going to survive long, one way or another.

Decided to level up the rarest "can't be obtained" pets I could think of (that I own.) Currently sitting at a lvl 7 Spirit of Competition, lvl 7 Vampire Bat and lvl 7 Windrider Cub (ok, so that one's not particularly rare, but it's too damn cute not to level first.)

I managed to defeat the EK grand master, so now have pet battle dailies available.

I am saddened that I missed out on catching the Wanderer's Festival Turtle because the listed time frame was incorrect. Everything I've read said it's supposed to be 9-11pm server time on Sundays. I was there for the opening (got the achievement) then ran off to level my pets some more to be able to catch the thing (my lvl 15-16 pets weren't really up for a 3x lvl 23 match.) By the time I got back around 10:30pm, the festival was over (and there was supposed to be 30 minutes of it.)

Guess I'll be good to go for next week at least, but it just kind of annoys me that I missed out.

Went through and collected all the pets from the zones (except the baby ape, damn you non-raining island) in the EK that are sub level 12 pets. I think the best unique pet from those catches is the infected bear cub with the creepy spider eggs on its back.

We live in a society where people born on third base constantly try to steal second, yet we expect people born with two strikes against them to hit a homerun on the first pitch.

Keep a high level pet and 2 lower ones,enjoy winning because you get placed against someone with a similar average "team-level" but your higher leveled pet just dodges/outlast everything on the opposing team (or,when he goes down,he has left the other team almost dead)

/sarcasm

I usually end as the "opposing team" in the above scenario....

All the character profile site keep going down,so i could as well not place anything here

Fenris wrote:/sarcasmKeep a high level pet and 2 lower ones,enjoy winning because you get placed against someone with a similar average "team-level" but your higher leveled pet just dodges/outlast everything on the opposing team (or,when he goes down,he has left the other team almost dead)

Mini-Tyrael and Peddlefeet really shine against such setups.

"Oh, you've got two level 1 benchwarmers? Lemme cleave/volley them all down for you."

I tried it for what must have been at least an hour. I had at least 150 pets already so it's really difficult to get excited about catching critters with models made 8 years ago and terrible stats when I have a bunch of unique looking pets like Deathy, Thor, Wind Rider Cub etc.

KysenMurrin wrote:The fact that there are hundreds of pets now that're just ordinary small animals does feel kinda crappy to me. Pets used to almost all feel a little special, now they're mostly rodents and frogs.

Nearly every zone has a rare/low spawn rate pet to get. Some may be a variant of a common type, like the Moccasin in Swamp of Sorrows, or a unique skin of a common one, Twilight Iguana in Thousand Needles, but there's quite a few unique models. But yea, 15 roach types, rabbits, and snakes get tiring, when you're going for Safari achievements. Stopped trying to catch specific qualities of those a while back.

We live in a society where people born on third base constantly try to steal second, yet we expect people born with two strikes against them to hit a homerun on the first pitch.

Flex wrote:But yea, 15 roach types, rabbits, and snakes get tiring, when you're going for Safari achievements. Stopped trying to catch specific qualities of those a while back.

When the 5.0 patch came out a friend and I have a good laugh scrolling down the pokedex, seeing all the copies of existing pets. The catchable pets should all be new. Just another example of Blizzard half-arsing something and massively padding it out to mask how wafer thin it is. IMO if you're going to introduce a new mechanic to the game then do it properly, otherwise don't bother and just stick to what your game does well. I don't think anyone who was responsible for this has ever played a Pokemon game from start to finish because this so badly misses the point.

Starting out with 150 pets and having to grind rabbits, squirrels, snakes, frogs, spiders, chickens etc. over and over on several different pets (none of which I caught)... smh.